PERFORMANCE

Performance is a self-portrait like no other. David Coventry takes us into his experience of ME, a debilitating systemic disease which took hold in March 2013 but has roots in his childhood.

For Coventry, ME radically overturns the rules of time, thought and embodiment – an experience which has shaped the writing of this book. Through an illuminating blend of life transcription and deep imaginative projection, he shows how placing fiction into the stories of our damaged lives can remind us of who we are and who we might have been, even when so much of us has been taken away by illness. 

From a mountaineering disaster in Kaikōura to a literary encounter in Austria, a country mansion to a volcanic archipelago, this novel is a strikingly vivid, at times disorienting series of journeys, stopovers and emergencies that take in the world, one in which Coventry is often an outsider, even when at home in Wellington. With purposeful unreliability and flashes of humour amid pain and searching, Performance takes us into a space where ‘reading’ itself fails as a description of how we meet the text. This is a generous, unforgettable vista of life within illness.

‘Constant and random death pirouettes through Performance, in car crashes, seizures, cysts and mountaineering accidents, yet the sheer majesty of Coventry’s literary achievement infuses his novel with a dazzling intrigue. It is not a “depressing” read. Self-diagnosed by Coventry as “a cryptic book for a cryptic disease”, Performance is the sort of novel young existentialists carry around as a talisman. Through art and attention, Coventry offers a way to live when living seems impossible.’ Theo Macdonald, North and South Magazine.

‘Performance is ‘less a novel and more an act of creative transcendence. Transcendence of illness, of an impaired state, of the limitations of the body, and of the rules of linear storytelling. Writing of the work of an artist friend, Coventry wonders if ‘in the process of painting, the work itself will solve the illness, that escape is at the end of the correct brushstroke’. Performance is a series of correct brushstrokes. [The novel] is complex, sophisticated, and punk as fuck. The gift Coventry gives us as readers is to trust us with the time slips and the unreliability and fluidity. To trust us to read into his space.’  Michalia Arathimos, Kete Books.

‘Like all great art, Performance defies paraphrase. This novel is a staggeringly ambitious work that few writers or scholars could conceive and probably only one could enact. It locates David Coventry in a genealogy of modern and postmodern writers including Virginia Woolf and Thomas Bernhard, whose illness intelligence is part of what makes their work innovative, important, and unforgettable.’ —Martha Stoddard Holmes, author of Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victoria Culture

‘A masterpiece of narrative disintegration with a deep psychic grip on the reader – a book whose design not infrequently had me exhaling in both profound affect and aesthetic astonishment. A monumental achievement.’ Tracey Slaughter, author of Devil’s Trumpet and Conventional Weapons

'Performance is a mesmerising and at times beautiful read, albeit tragic . . . The reader too feels a sense falling into Coventry’s world as they read this extraordinary book.' Alyson Baker

‘Like all great art, Performance defies paraphrase. This novel is a staggeringly ambitious work that few writers or scholars could conceive and probably only one could enact. It locates David Coventry in a genealogy of modern and postmodern writers including Virginia Woolf and Thomas Bernhard, whose illness intelligence is part of what makes their work innovative, important, and unforgettable.’ —Martha Stoddard Holmes, author of Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victoria Culture

'Compelling, thoughtful, memorable, suitably frustrating and disconcerting. It is a unique contribution to the literature of illness.' —Thomas Koed, Volume Books
'Performance has all the qualities of the best "creative non-fiction" – compelling characters, arresting situations, stimulating themes – but Coventry permits himself something more besides: points of view other than his own and fantastical flights (at one point literally) of imagination that take leave of reality altogether. . . . And despite what it asks of us as readers – perhaps because of what it asks of us – Performance leaves more of an impression than many a more conventional book.' — Guy Somerset, Aotearoa New Zealand Review of Books